enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 12 years 12 months ago

t 9 min read

Last week, the biggest brains behind search marketing gathered in San Francisco to share their ideas on success in earned media at BrightEdge's premier digital marketing event, Share13. A dazzling list of speakers, headed by global leaders like Microsoft, Rosetta, Google, and top social networking sites, made the event a huge success with many key takeaways for all involved.

One of the biggest takeaways can be summed up in one word: mobile. It is no secret that the number of users searching on mobile devices has skyrocketed. The real question is how is this new trend impacting your business? Or better yet, how do you take advantage of the growth in mobile traffic to maximize ROI across devices? BrightEdge has answers.

BrightEdge recently released our MobileShare Report that shows the growth in mobile search and how search, traffic, and conversions vary greatly across different device types. On the heels of that research we just announced brand new features to help our customers gain insight into how this massive industry trend affects their bottom line and how to take advantage of it.  

Mobile Share of Voice

The patented BrightEdge Share of Voice technology has always been a go-to tool to provide insight into how your pages stand up to competition on desktop devices. Now, Share of Voice goes mobile to give you instant visibility into your mobile competitive landscape for tablet and smartphone. If you’re not sure how the mobile trend is affecting your business, Share of Voice is a quick way to see the big picture; you may be surprised how your market share differs across devices.     

Mobile Site Audit

It's not enough, however, just to observe the shift towards mobile. You need to take action and optimize your pages specifically for this type of traffic in order to be effective. BrightEdge Site Audit now features an analysis for mobile-specific search results. We've gone ahead and done the homework for you to make sure that you're keeping in line with Google's best practices by laying out their latest rules for this niche.     

Mobile Click Curves

This is one of my personal favorites from this release: BrightEdge Click Curves. Click Curves provide valuable insight into how traffic is distributed on SERPs, and can be used to predict what click-through rate (CTR) your pages can expect. We're thrilled to be the first-to-market with click curves for tablet and smartphone, in addition to desktop. Now you can predict ROI from search channels with more accuracy and confidence.     

Enhanced Recommendations Experience

In other improvements, BrightEdge has enhanced its page-based recommendations. BrightEdge provides recommendations to help ensure your pages comply with search best-practices. Customers can now prioritize recommendations based on analytics metrics like visits, orders, and revenue. Additionally, users can now easily add the Recommendations Summary Report to any dashboard for a snapshot of top recommendations.     

BrightEdge Certification Program

It's the back-to-school season, and we've gone academic ourselves by introducing the BrightEdge Certification Program. Get trained and certified on core functionality to help you maximize value from the platform. Verify a marketable skill set and get a fancy certificate to frame for your desk!  

If you are a BrightEdge customer, you will have received the BrightEdge Share13 Release Summary by email - please take a minute to learn more about the release.

Be sure to attend the new release webinars - register by visiting http://www.help.brightedge.com/en/webinars/upcoming.  

Bradley Smith

M Posted 13 years ago

t 9 min read

This is a guest post in the BrightEdge Customer Column, a series of SEO best practices shared by thought-leaders among the BrightEdge customer community. This post describes how leading agency Relevance™ increased Rackspace traffic using BrightEdge's powerful competitive intelligence capabilities, and is written by Brad Smith, Inbound Marketing Consultant at Relevance™. Over the past year, Relevance has utilized the BrightEdge platform to help Rackspace execute a strategy that focuses on user experience. Fortunately, the BrightEdge platform allows any marketer to scale efforts from just a few to thousands of keywords. In the case of Rackspace, Relevance focused on improving natural search traffic for a great number of keywords. We used the associated keyword data to test, measure, optimize and refine specific campaigns related to Rackspace and achieve massive traffic gains.

How we use BrightEdge to win for Rackspace

Relevance uses the BrightEdge platform in many ways to inform each keyword campaign’s strategy. We have discovered that the BrightEdge platform allows us to not only monitor rankings, but also analyze what to do to create a better user experience. Here are seven powerful ways BrightEdge powered the Relevance/Rackspace strategy.

Rank tracking

Having a historical record of a keyword’s performance is helpful, but this is just the starting point. Understanding a keyword’s ranking is most helpful for competitor analysis.

Dashboard creation

Creating dashboards is helpful for snapshot reporting. It allows a marketer or marketing manager to see a quick snapshot of historical or competitive performance. Relevance also grouped keywords by related Rackspace product, created dashboards based on groups and set up each dashboard so that it can be emailed to the associated Rackspace product manager on a weekly basis.

Share of voice

BrightEdge reports up to the top 25 competitors for each search engine results page (SERP) based on keyword group. This allows Relevance and Rackspace to keep their fingers on the pulse of each competitor. The share of voice report also identifies what keyword(s) each competitor rank(s) for in that group.

Earned media overlap

BrightEdge identifies earned media opportunities for any tracked keyword. It also identifies which opportunities have multiple competitors. The key takeaway here is that if more than one competitor shows up on any particular opportunity, Rackspace may have a higher chance of also earning a placement on that same opportunity.

Keyword discovery

BrightEdge tracks keywords input into their system; they also identify competitor-targeted keywords that have not been entered into their system. Relevance utilizes this feature to help make suggestions for future keyword targeting campaigns.

Page-specific optimization

BrightEdge identifies all pages related to any targeted keyword. From there, BrightEdge creates natural search specific recommendations to optimize the on-page architecture for any page and associated keyword.

Competitive analysis

For any targeted keyword, BrightEdge will tell you the top 10 competitors in search for that keyword and will also identify each of the top 10 competitors’ on-page elements that impact search. This allows Relevance to supplement recommendations with related competitive analysis data.

Shifting focus to user experience

When it comes to natural search, rankings serve as a leading indicator to traffic. So, it’s no surprise that many mid- to high-level marketing managers focus solely on achieving higher rankings for each keyword they are targeting. In the end, however, rankings fluctuate from week to week and even day-to-day. Fluctuating rankings are one way for Google and other search engines to quickly determine if a Webmaster is attempting to game the search engine. For this reason, the focus to improve natural search traffic must be shifted from simply achieving rankings to creating a better user experience. But how does a marketing manager make that shift? The answer lies in understanding what Google and all other search engines pursue for their own platforms—and for their users. If a search engine continuously serves inadequate results to a user, that user could find another search engine that will provide him with the results that satisfies his search. Ultimately, each search engine must supply what the user demands: a better search experience.

Satisfying your users, not their search algorithms

When a marketer focuses only on rankings, the most common mistake made is catering the site only to search engines. The point of failure here is when the search engine ranks the marketer’s site higher in the search engines. Sure, the site begins receiving visitors, but the visitors can’t find what they are looking for and ultimately leave the site (bounce rate metric). Google and other search engines actually measure visitor satisfaction through on-page interactions. They can do this regardless of whether the marketers have the unique search engine analytics package installed by measuring on-page metrics.

When on-page metrics are low, Google and other search engines must lower the site’s rankings for related keywords to continue satisfying their user base. But when the focus is on user experience, the marketer innately caters to the user. The site’s on-page metrics may perform well and, because of this, search engines know they can satisfy their users’ search queries by sending visitors to the site whose on-page metrics perform consistently well. When user experience is the marketer’s focus, optimizing a site’s content and architecture each receive the appropriate amount of attention. From here, the marketer can utilize data—and yes, this means rankings—to make informed decisions that will help execute a well-planned marketing strategy. This post lists just seven of the powerful ways Relevance utilizes the BrightEdge platform to help Rackspace make informed decisions on creating a better user experience—and this in turn boosts natural search traffic to the Rackspace website.

Learn more about the Rackspace success story

To learn more about the results of the efforts, read the case study which includes the results or attend the Share13 session. Details listed below: Case Study: http://relevance.com/resources/case-studies/

Come see us at Share13

Relevance and Rackspace will be discussing this case study at BrightEdge Share13. Hope you can see us there.

Details are below: Time & Date - August 22 - 4:00-4:50 PM PST Track - Earned Media: Maximize your impact Session Title – Bringing it all together - Search and Earned Media Session Overview - Search, social, PR and blogs have the potential for driving significant business results collectively. Choosing where to allocate marketing dollars and attributing results can be a challenge.

Hear from digital marketers on the earned media mix that delivers the maximum return. Speakers David Whitworth, SEO Manager, Rackspace Marty Muse - Vice President, Client Solutions & Success, Relevance

Andy Betts

M Posted 13 years ago

t 9 min read

BrightEdge are proud have Resolution Media as a premium sponsor at Share13. As part of the Share13 blog series we had the chance to catch up briefly with Alan Osetek, President of Resolution Media as he prepares for his panel presentation on the Digital CMO. Alan is presenting alongside Mike Grehan from Incisive Media, Jeremy Sanchez, CEO, of Global Strategies and Christian Nimsky, VP of Digital, at Consumer Reports.

About Alan Osetek  

Alan Osetek is the President of Resolution Media and oversees the growth and expansion of the brand in the U.S. A digital industry veteran, prior to joining Resolution Media, Osetek was the Managing Director for iProspect’s Boston office, responsible for overseeing all activities for iProspect's east coast operations.

Here is what Alan had to say on current trends and topics in search, social and content:

Digital marketers on the brand or agency side have to learn, grow and hone new skills faster than ever before to keep up with their constantly evolving audiences. This year’s Share13 lineup of topics and speakers will help brands and individuals stay ahead of the competition. I’m honored to be a part of the event and excited about the many critical topics we’ll tackle together.

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When Google Secure Search began cloaking SEO referring keyword data, it immediately confused and disrupted the day-to-day reality of every SEO professional. But since then it’s been a tale of two approaches, exposing a glaring weakness of SEO shops that leaned too heavily on referring keyword data all along. Those that leaned entirely on referring keyword data have either reinvented themselves or filled the data hole with guesswork and estimations. The best digital marketing and SEO agencies have always treated referring keyword data as one piece of a much larger puzzle of consumer behavior.

At Resolution, we leverage ClearTargetTM to define digital customers and audiences. And referring keyword data from SEO campaigns represents just one fractional component of ClearTarget. By combining digital measurement and research services, paid search and SEO intelligence, Web analytics, and brands’ proprietary CRM insights, we help our clients minimize the damage of “not provided” and we build more accurate customer models with this omni-channel approach to behavioral analysis.

Content marketing

Content has become a key focus of search and digital marketing because it’s an element of everything we do and enables brands to cater to their most important audiences in a cost effective owned media environment. The brands that best capitalize on content are often the brands that understand their core audience segments and how they behave across a wide range of media channels.

Content permeates everything we do - From understanding how audiences consume content and what key types of content a brand may be missing to actually brainstorming, copywriting and optimizing content, not to mention ad copy, landing pages, product descriptions and more. Today, the best search agencies understand that every service they deliver relies on content marketing expertise. And they build every content marketing effort on the foundation of a core understanding of the audience and its behaviors.

The rise of earned media

The best brands aim high for converged media – the elusive media that is owned, paid and earned. A piece of controversial research, for example, can start out as owned media – for example a report or a video. But brands that can identify the owned media with high potential turn to paid media to extend reach. With broad enough reach content can go viral through online shares or editorial media coverage. Advanced software such as Kenshoo Social (another great sponsor at Share13) provides the ability to identify the best performing owned media and further promote it with paid media (ads) so it eventually becomes earned media. Best practices in this arena change often and brands should be seeking out partners that bring the scale required to keep them ahead of the competition.

Measuring performance across sites, social and search

We start with client goals, measure the performance of content according to those goals and then do all we can to improve performance. In social, this approach is still in its infancy, because it takes a combination of sophisticated software packages (such as Brightedge) to measure the performance of owned social media (learn more about social media metrics). For some marketers, clickthroughs or shares might matter most, but in a lot of instances, it will be softer metrics like time spent with content or even page views. The most important element is creating a logical connection between goals and optimization, making sure the content deemed most effective is the content that best helps the brand meet its campaign goals.

Mobile search best practices

Like commerce, payment, direct response and so many other disciplines, mobile has completely upended search, because people have access to unprecedented knowledge resources at hand any time, any place, and in any situation. The best mobile search marketers have applied comprehensive solutions to solve the mobile puzzle, unleashing apps, mobile sites, mobile social campaigns and separate mobile paid search campaigns. Even today, many marketers still struggle to embrace Google’s enhanced campaigns, and this was one of the most fundamental and publicized changes in mobile search ever.

At the end of the day, brand marketers consistently tell us there are just too many changes happening too quickly for them to stay competitive without help. This truth also extends to agencies today; we leverage technology partnerships to keep brands positioned to capitalize on new opportunities and strengthen bonds with their audiences regardless of technology, platform or device. Thanks to changes in mobile search, identifying the right technologies and partners may be a more important component of digital marketing than ever before.

Share13 is in San Francisco on August 22-23 Share13 is the industry’s premier digital marketing event focused on organic search and digital marketing. Share13 is packed with content from leading brands and hands on practitioners on what is working in their business today. Unlike many other user conferences and public tradeshows, share is exclusively for search and digital marketing practitioners at leading brands. Attendees learn best practices from leaders, share their own expertise and make connections that last a lifetime.

Information and registration: http://www.brightedge.com/share13 Follow updates on Twitter @brightedge #share13